The Tories may soon be shaken out of their complacency on immigration

According to the liberal left, concerns about immigration are on the wane in Britain and the issue is no longer the emotive electoral force that it once was.

Like most pieces of received wisdom about British politics, this view is completely wrong. We have merely been living through a pause in fretting about the volume and nature of immigration to the UK.

In part that was due to Brexit giving voters the feeling that national control had been re-established and decisive government action to bolster our borders was therefore bound to follow and in part because other issues – most notably Covid – crowded this one out.

The pause is now over. The shambolic spectacle of thousands of migrants sailing across the Channel from France, landing on the south coast and then claiming asylum if apprehended or presumably melting away into our big cities to live as illegal immigrants if not apprehended, has seen to that.

New polling from YouGov has found that immigration is now the top priority among Tory voters – nudging ahead of the economy, above restoring the health service post-Covid and way above the “Code Red” environmental threat to all of humanity which that UN bod warned us all about the other day. This YouGov survey replicates the finding of another recent poll by Redfield & Wilton Strategies.

When the phenomenon of the cross-Channel migrant boats got underway in earnest in the summer of 2019, Boris Johnson – newly installed as PM - talked very tough on it, recording a video interview in which he thundered: “We will send you back.” 

Home Secretary Priti Patel took this as her cue, often talking about the joint initiatives she was undertaking with France to make the route “completely non-viable”. The idea of pushing the boats back mid-Channel was talked about, France was paid tens of millions of pounds to prevent them setting off in the first place and the deportation threats were repeated. None of it has worked. In fact, deportations have fallen rather than risen as human rights lawyers have become ever more adept at throwing late spanners in the works.

The migrant traffic has escalated enormously over the past two summers and ministers now say that building a giant new reception centre at Dover can be part of a “sustainable solution” to the crisis, indicating that they expect the landings to continue on a large scale for the foreseeable future.

And now we are seeing the political consequences. That large part of the electorate which is normally minded to vote Conservative or at least consider doing so clearly does not regard a de facto surrender as a sustainable solution at all. The Tory poll standing has slumped by around five points over the past two months, with nearly all of the lost support showing up in the “don’t know/won’t vote” column rather than jumping to other parties.

The monthly satisfaction survey for Cabinet ministers run by the Conservative Home website has shown disastrous collapses in the ratings of Mr Johnson and Ms Patel, meaning there is little room for doubt that the immigration shambles is the prime factor behind ebbing morale among the Tory tribe.

And yet, there has been a notable absence of genuine fear among Conservative MPs about the political consequences of this ongoing failure. While Nigel Farage has been making hay over the issue on his prime-time GB News show, he no longer leads a political party. Our old friend Tina (There Is No Alternative) seems to have been protecting the Conservatives. After all, which of us could possibly think that Labour or the Lib Dems would try any harder to repel the boats?

The Tory poll lead may have slid from an average of eight points to an average of four points but really, so what? Most Governments would be delighted with such mid-term ratings and they seem to show that the main party of opposition is incapable of mounting a challenge for power. 

Yet in politics as in physics, horror vacui - nature abhors a vacuum. This effective disenfranchisement of the millions of us who believe rigorous immigration controls are important and must be implemented cannot stand.

After months of majoring on anti-lockdown and concerns about Covid vaccines, the Reform UK party has suddenly started to flag up immigration. As the successor to the Brexit Party, Reform has been stuck on two to three per cent in the polls and flopped in the spring elections. Many people are simply unaware of its existence.

But just as the impact of free movement drove the rise of UKIP after the UK jobs market was thrown open to the countries of Eastern Europe, so the current immigration shambles could prove a springboard for Reform.

The Twitter feed of its leader, the cerebral Richard Tice, is suddenly full of passion on the issue. “SICK; Murderer & rapist among ex-cons taken off deportation flight,” notes one tweet. “With rights come responsibilities. Foreign nationals turned criminals have reneged on their responsibilities thus lose their rights to say in UK. Simple,” says another, which includes a clip of Nigel Farage venting on his TV show. A third highlights a story about Michel Barnier calling for a five-year moratorium on immigration into the EU.

At last Mr Tice is signalling to those looking to give the Tories a kicking over their uselessness on immigration that his party is ready to oblige. Those people sitting in despair in the “don’t know” column may start realising they have a place to go. If, as a consequence, Reform starts posting poll scores of six, eight or ten per cent we will be reminded that one thing can always shake the Conservative Party out of its complacency: the fear that its grip on power is starting to slip away.